A Funny Sci-Fi Book That Begins with Galactic Gods Starting a New Game of Civilisation with Alien Species

STILL UNSOLVED - I posted this a few years ago (and a couple of years before that) but never found it.

Around 2013 I picked up a fairly standard-sized paperback that I flicked though, but didn't buy/borrow/steal at the time.

It begins with a group of space-gods starting a new game. They each choose or draw a different alien race and the winning god has to get their species to advance furthest technologically and culturally.

Unfortunately one of the gods has drawn, "Humanity", which in galactic terms has barely got out of the "hitting each other with rocks" part of evolution and isn't even close to developing a faster-than-light drive.

The book's narrator explains that going faster than light isn't actually that difficult, in terms of getting the physics right and building a drive unit to implement it. The problem is accelerating to faster than light speed in any reasonable time without compressing your face into the back of your skull and splattering your brains across half the solar system before you even get halfway there. You need an inertial dampener.

Luckily, by some strange chance (and possibly influenced by one of the gods playing the game) one of the humans has just found such a device underneath an old bedsheet in his closet.

I think that's up to about page 10 or the end of Chapter 1 of the book, and all I can remember. I think that most of the rest of the book is about humans setting a proper commercial space agency using this new technology. I seem to remember the human space agency chapter being a little more mundane and a bit boring, but I'm willing to give it another shot.

Suggestions appreciated!

Edit: Minor spelling. Edit: Still unsolved. Not sure why this is flaired.